Response to Brookfield (English 8050).

In her post on Brookfield's first few chapters, Mary Karcher evaluates Brookfield's claim that it's normal for good teachers to worry that their practices are fraudulent. Brookfield offers a path out of this sense of self-mistrust: teachers should "make students feel safe" by consistengly modeling "a public, critical scrutiny of your actions" (p. 36). In her discussion of Brookfield, Mary points out an apparent contradiction in Brookfield's thinking that most readers (ie me) would miss: If we as teachers feel like frauds, should we spend so much time trying to convince students to trust us?

Although I missed that contradiction in my own reading of Brookfield, I agree with Mary that self-mistrust is an inauspicious and problematic start towards gaining the trust of others.

Furthermore, elements of benevolent disingenuity seem implicitly woven into the act of teaching. Anyone can recall the elementary school shock of realizing that teachers go to the bathroom, eat dinner, and get married: the cloak of "professional distance" enacted by teachers is strangely akin to purdah, a sacred form of deception. Like traditionally Islamic women, teachers "conceal their form" to command respect and deflect harm.

The form of concealment is less modest in a college writing environment than on the Indian Subcontent; here, sweat pants will attract more disrespect than form-fitting clothing, and writing teacher work hard to "demystefy" processes such as writing, revising, formatting and grading college papers. But the insurgencies of fraud are there.
Student: Did you read my paper that I sent you?
Hilary: (in her mind) No.
Student: Will you read it tonight and send me my comments?
Hilary: (in her mind): Not tonight. Tomorrow is not looking promising either.
Hilary: (aloud) Since you're here, why don't you sit down and I'll give you your grade and comments verbally? That way, you can ask me questions and we can have a productive dialogue about your writing.

Similarly, Erik The Friend notes in a comment below that he co-constructs assignment sheets with his students--this practice is not inspired by Erik's enthusiasm for translating open-source code back to print media, but rather, by his deep psychological need not to spend time outside of class making up an assignment sheet (an assignment sheet that students would actively misunderstand and would therefore require a few explanatory emails or subsheets, anyway). In both of these cases, the mild form of deception (which typically stems from lack of time or instructor lazieness) actually leads to more satisfying and functional teaching practices: verbal face to face feedback, open-source assignment sheets. If kept in check, these forms of "fraudulence" can provide a functional heuristic: the fundamental differences between teachers and students are illusory, so, if a teaching task seems too hard to execute, it probably won't work from the students' perspective either. A moiety of critically informed lazieness goes as far as other forms of critical inquiry.

Besides, one thing about English 1020: students are already programmed to resent the college writing requirment, and absolutely love discovering ways of seeing their writing teacher as a fraud. She can't teach. He's sweaty. He always wears the same pants. She gives you a higher grade if you're sexy. He doesn't really read your papers. She gives you a higher grade on your revision when you just change words around. Everything she knows comes from the instructor copy fo that book. I could of just read the book. She smells like formaldehyde.

Therefore, in light of the critique that Brookfield's regime of "public and critical scrutiny" takes too much time: Rather than aspiring to be a non-fraud, I would argue that teachers of writing should actively model mild forms of instructor-based fraudulence, give extra points to students for uncovering them throughout the course, then assign a paper in which students must recognize and uncover a powerful deception beyond the classroom. That's an assignment that students and teachers can get into. It would help to keep them searching, and us honest.